Blender 2.78c on CentOS python environment
If you can, install from system repositories. I've heard that CentOS's isn't very good at this, and on Windows you can't, so here are some other solutions.

The first thing to try is deleting the python folder from the blender install. (you don't need to symlink it, remove it entirely) This should make it use the system python.

The next thing to try is to install pip inside blender. This isn't too hard to do, and is useful in many other cases (eg want a portable version of blender with a specific module)


Download get-pip.py and rename it to get_pip.py
Start blender's python runtime (inside blender/2.78/python/bin/) and run the executable (python3.5m on linux 2.78c) from a terminal.
Add your download folder to the path so python can find get_pip. Do this with:

import sys
sys.path.append('~/Downloads')  # Change path as required

Now you should be able to import get_pip, and run get_pip.main().
Then, to install things, you can use:

import pip
pip.main(['install', 'osgeo'])



You could try it from blender's built in console, but on the windows version this does funny things (like opening lots of instances of blender!),  so I haven't gone into detail.